The manufacturing of integrated circuits (ICs) is a very highly researched area and as a result, has become a very efficient and automated process with relatively little human interaction. This automation has led to lower costs for the manufacturer and better quality products for the consumer. Automation results in lower costs because machines typically work faster and with fewer errors when compared to humans. Additionally, machines can work longer and with fewer needed breaks.
Unfortunately, not all tasks involved in the manufacturing process have been amenable to being automated. For example, once the ICs have been packaged and tested, the ICs are commonly placed into plastic tubes for storage and shipping purposes. Machines have been designed to perform such packing operations, but they tend to be complex and are slow and sensitive to becoming misaligned. Human packing of the ICs, on the other hand, is tedious and slow. Finally, combining humans and large machinery can lead to serious operator injuries.
One proposed solution involves the combination of both machines and humans. The human operators load the plastic tubes into the machines and the machines, through large pinchers, remove a pin used to hold the ICs in the plastic tubes. The pin is sometimes referred to as a retention pin. With the pin removed, the ICs are loaded into the plastic tubes and the machine replaces the pin. Once the pin is replaced, the human operator removes the plastic tubes filled with ICs. The pinchers used to remove the pins are large pneumatic mechanisms that tend to become misaligned quite easily, resulting in incorrect re-placement of the pins and possible damage to the plastic tubes and the ICs. Whenever a problem arises, the machine has to be shut down and the problem cleared through human intervention. This can greatly reduce the efficiency of the entire process. Additionally, the large size of the pneumatic pinchers poses a real danger to the human operators when the operators are loading and removing the plastic tubes from the machines.
A need has therefore arisen for machinery that can maximize automation of the IC packing process and at the same time minimize the threat of physical injury to their human operators.